I think I understand the theory here, I guess the best way to explain it would be to take an analogy from WWII. When I asked my grandfather about liberating camps like Auschwitz he told me that when the Allies first attempted to treat the former prisoners by giving them meals, they'd almost always die. Some of them died from gorging themselves, and some died because their systems went into shock. After so long without proper nourishment, they had physiologically adapted to process only small amounts of food at a time. When conditions suddenly normalized, they weren't able to readapt to the new conditions them fast enough to survive. Good meals would quite literally kill them. So instead, what troops ended up doing was having to feed people spoonfuls of soft foods, like mush, at a time and gradually step-up the process to get to full meals.crabber wrote:I'm sorry, I have had this problem before too.
I'm trying to get my mind around this, but.....I'm not sure how deluted salt water would help a straw absorb it more easily. Are they dying from salt toxicity, or this absorbtion problem? If it is an absorbtion problem I just don't see how lowering the saltinity would help......
What I think posters are trying to say here is that the hermies are gorging themselves on the salt water and causing system shock or salt poisoning. If you dilute the water, they might still gorge themselves, but it would have less of an effect since the concentration is lower. For the most part, this would make sense, since Coenabita Research Society's info on PPS kind of confirms that hermies adapt to changes slowly, and don't snap back in good conditions very fast. Which is why they suggested ISOing new crabs in conditions that mimic the pet store's temp/humidity, and then gradually adjusting those until they match the main tank.
We simply don't know what is causing this behavior, it could have nothing to do with absorbtion at all.......
I'd be better at annalyizing data.